123140-i-cant-believe-what-im-seeing
Content ---- ---- On a more serious note, as explained by beattlebilly, all servers have been merged into MegaServers. Each region now has a single PvE and PvP server. This was a much needed move as a lot of the servers were in a really bad shape. Populations are recovering more and more with each drop, and we're all looking forward now to Drop 5 which should bring many anticipated changes for PvP. | |} ---- Yeah, Entity is a pretty big server. Technically, the server will spin off additional instances of zones when it gets too full. I don't know if that happens now, but compared to Evindra, Entity is bigger than I think Evindra ever was by a significant margin. | |} ---- ---- What do you mean by "inaccessible"? | |} ---- ---- ---- Hard for the average player to partake in all of the content. | |} ---- ---- Euh, not really. It's more a case of getting used to a totally different play style. | |} ---- How? I was running vets with a bunch of casuals last night. Nothing took over an hour and we didn't fail anything. I hear that a bit from people who left in July and June. I recommend rolling Entity. | |} ---- ---- I kind of agree with this, if we're talking about the leveling experience (where most players fall off, from what I've heard). Leveling was fun for me at first, but it dropped off around level 20 and became not as fun. Quests got more grindy and the Primals pissed me off (accidental tuned-up mob pull is not my ideal challenge type). From there I started trying dungeons, which are (imo) definitely overtuned for a leveling public. PVP was decent and I wouldn't say inaccessible, but for the first while it seems incredibly spammy, low-skill, somewhat zergish, and the objectives/layout aren't covered too well for anyone new to the BG. When I leveled my first toon (strictly through PVP from levels 10-36), I felt like getting into the PVP wasn't super hard, but it did seem like the type of PVP that would be hard for new players to get into. On track, OP, this is one of the lightweight MMOs. But it's not something you should worry too much about... unless you're Dominion and in a niche timezone. | |} ---- Well, I'll concede that the attunement process is a bit draggy, but is it hard? IDK, I'm only at the Adventures step because that's where I stopped, I'm not really a group PvE'er(I just figured I'd get it going just in case I ever decided to raid) :P But that being said, isn't there content in just about any game that's not partaken/partakable by all the players? | |} ---- yeah, me too. and i was carrying all the other dps with my raid gear and them dying at every bosses. actually.. now is a good time for people to come back because most often than not there are 1 or 2 over geared players per run and it really make things easy. | |} ---- Might be your browser. Sometimes there are issues with them and these forums. Welcome back! :) | |} ---- Usually that kind of content comes with the prefix Hardmode/Savage/Mythic etc.. with a regular mode for the regular players. | |} ---- Browser problem or behind a proxy that prevents Javascript. | |} ---- The casuals Vic was running through were all in vet shiphands/crafted gear. I was there, too. I am in mostly crafted and/or dropped from the daily zones gear and had no issues with any of it. Yeah there were a few deaths, but I blame the healer (I was the healer for some of them). | |} ---- Yeah, "Casual" doesn't mean "undergeared" and definitely not "bad". It just means people who aren't running set schedule content more nights than not. Our prep was literally: "We should run Vet Adventures tomorrow!" Pre-run up went: "Uh, which ones should we run?" "I don't know, where's everyone at in attunement?" "25% Vet Adventures?" "I'm at the rep step..." "Okay... WoTW is easiest. Want to start there?" And we had a great time! The whole thing is that the content's definitely accessible. We're not hardcore. I didn't know most of the boss fights we were jumping into. We played it mostly by ear and improvised. We used no voice chat. We are, as far as I can see, one of the most casual groups on Entity. And we did just fine running Vet content, getting upgrades, etc. It's very accessible. It's friendly to casual timeframes; nothing took more than an hour. What it isn't is a cakewalk. Even WotW wasn't a foregone conclusion or a chore we were just going through the motions on. That's what makes it fun. Even Vet WotW isn't a foregone conclusion to even decently geared players, you do have to take it somewhat seriously. | |} ---- There is a regular mode. It's called normal. You can rally down to it. | |} ---- Works with Chrome fine...thanks guys. | |} ---- I was one of those 'casuals' as you well know :) I am the epitome of 'average player'. What I mean by that is that I've been here since winter beta and have only one 50 in my stable. On these runs that we did I never died, was at least # 3 in damage (sometimes higher) and I finally got rid of my last 'yellow' piece of armor. I'm now in mostly blues with two or three epic purples. I am working on attunement and imbuements. So if I, as average as I am, can do it anyone can. Seriously. As far as the mega servers go, if you group with people out in the world you can easily see them at work. Beside the name it will often say, for example, Sophie DuPree (Different Phase). Just because you might not see people, they are around, just phased differently. So OP, don't worry over things like 'only 2 servers' Mega servers are massive. | |} ---- ---- ---- Don't the tier 2 vet dungeons also drop 1140 AP weapons? | |} ---- That change was on the PTR long before it went live, and if I'm not mistake you can get equivalent/better from some of the Vet Dungeons(I vaguely remember someone mentioning Vet SSM?). | |} ---- Sadly no. You have much better access to weapons in the middle (around 1140 AP) but the 1214 AP convergence weapons are a much rarer drop now. My raid has seen more ohmna weapons than new convergence weapons, but that's just our experience. Some raids have had weapons drops out the wazoo. I don't think it is a reason to stop raiding, but thats just me. Some people get discouraged much more easily. | |} ---- Ah ok :D Thanks for the information, it was something I read a while ago so that's good to know. | |} ---- Well, sometimes you get ppl that have done the dungeon atleast a few times and know the mechanics, but there's big possibility you will get some new guys aswell . I do my best to explain fights and other challenges to get ppl into the dungeons. and wipes are inevitable sometimes , but that is what makes the game for me . I will be completely honest and say that i wont be playing Wildstar 2 months after i subbed if it didnt have harder PvE content then the average MMO out there. Also i really love the medal system cos it rewards you for improving your gameplay and have better understanding of the mechanics . I hope Carbine wont nerf dungeons and new players will expirience the same difficulty we did. Casual group/solo content should be kept inside shiphands or in the open world . | |} ---- ---- can you tell all the people not playing in Wilderrun to stop stealing my quest items and mobs Kthnxbai also its hard to take you seriously as soon as you mention Frost. Leaving was one of the best things he did for Carbine. He was great as the voice of the devspeaks, he should have been banned from doing or saying anything else. | |} ---- ---- This is exactly what I was getting at by saying mega servers aren't actually mega servers. The most populated days I've seen since beta was the first two days of wildstar being out. After that, it was a slow decent. Its cool to support the game, but to live under a facade that wildstar is booming is another. Don't misrepresent the game. It has so much potential that it's literally oozing out of its pores, yet is held back by poor zone structure, slow maintenance, and GEAR. Gear is literally the most crucial part of the game, and its just barely getting fixed. Don't mind you, all the bad PvP players now have access to 1800 gear because there was no incentive for anyone to que, and shockingly the ques are still pretty bad from what I hear, even after making that 1800 gear available. Tl;dr: all I'm saying is stop the over hyping. It's a cool game, but the Devs really need to figure it out if they ever strive to hit 500k, let alone just 1 million. There's probably not even 50 thousand on the u.s. servers. You would be able to tell because thayd would be so jam packed that it would cause optimization issues.. Oh wait (looks at pinned optimization thread. 99+ pages sigh) | |} ---- ---- OP is NA... Try not to insult people unnecessarily. | |} ---- If I have that issue, which by the way affects posting pictures and links, it's usually when I'm using explorer. Just switch to chrome and it'll work. | |} ---- People are still fooled by the "mega server" bit? | |} ---- People are still trash talking? It was announced as mega-servers, and all servers are integrated into one server per game type : PvE or PvP. Not sure what more you want. | |} ---- ---- They hold more. Please don't lend your ear to the trolls and doomsayers everywhere. We're not a second World of Warcraft, but the game is reviving and growing. | |} ---- ? | |} ---- It's really a mega server. Really. Not sure why anyone would say otherwise. | |} ---- Essentially, it's a megaserver because if a zone takes on too many people, we get a new instance of that same zone. I have no idea if we've ever hit that ratio yet. I've had my player tracker kicking well up well above 200 people at Academy Corner in Thayd alone on a weeknight, so I don't know how often it has to spin off another zone instance. | |} ---- Probably not often, considering Dominion rarely boasts more than 60 people in a single area, and I'd say only 100 people in illium at a time during primetime. But there are also lots of people out in instances, too. | |} ---- The skyplots also help alleviate main housing zone concerns, for what it's worth. I mean, yeah, I think the Shadowcaster is more fun to hang out on than Academy Corner. I only go there if I need something. Really gets us in that Exile-western frame of mind when we gotta go into town to get dry goods and gingham. | |} ---- Just for the record, I've been getting PvP queues popping in five minutes or less (often nearly instantly) for the past month anytime I queue and the ratings requirements on gear were removed this morning. Obviously the claim you posted yesterday is wrong twice. I'm not trying to insult you or anything of that nature, just pointing out that you're uninformed. That's not surprising since you don't actually play the game. With the fact that you don't know what's going on in the game now in mind, can you please not try to dissuade another player from returning? | |} ---- Pretty sure this will never be a problem. lol | |} ---- I've had repeated times where I was trying to meet up with a guild-mate to trade with them and had to join a party so we could synchronize to the same instance in Thayd because we were both standing next to each other in separate instances, making us unable to see or interact with each other. It happens enough. | |} ---- Yes, the bottleneck we had that limited our server capacity at launch, and all through beta, has been fixed. We figured out what the max capacity of each realm was based on the Beta Stress Tests that we ran. Those stress tests clearly showed us what was limiting our realm populations. (I'm sure some of the players who were around for those stress tests can attest to what it was like to play on a realm that was "maxed out".) That bottleneck started getting worked on immediately, but didn't actually get fixed until about 2 months after launch (it was a very hard problem to solve.) Our current architecture can hold many times what our old architecture could. For the record, instancing the world zones wasn't what we fixed, that was always there since before Alpha, it was more related to packet distribution and routing. The PTR was actually running this code for quite a while before we announced we were switching to megaservers. Yes, we did lose population, and yes we were going to merge the lowest pop realms, but when we were discussing doing that merger is when we said, "Well, now that we have this new tech, can we go to a single realm architecture?" The answer was "yes", but we decided to stay with 2 so that we still had both PVP & PVE. We decided to rename them from realms to megaserver to help avoid confusion about what we did, from a purely technical standpoint it is still a realm. From an architectural standpoint we changed a whole lot of stuff to make the megaservers. And they truly can handle many times the users that our old realm architecture could. | |} ---- Thank you for this explanation. | |} ---- where is this info coming from? was there a dev post saying that the "mega" servers can hold more people than the orignal servers? im very inclined to believe that they are just normal servers like the originals, only difference being that everyone has 2 names now (also had to implement a system for this to occur and support it like messaging systems and mailing system, etc). same max players, just called a "mega" server. Edit: after reading dev post. mega servers can hold more than the original servers but this was because of tech introduced 2 months after launch not because of tech specifically designed for mega servers. | |} ---- Both. We are constantly working on improving our servers. We realized that the new tech allowed us to go this route, but the engineering goal was to remove the bottleneck, it wasn't specifically for mega servers. It just happened to allow us to do that. Most of the server improvements we do are behind the scenes and are not announced or explained. An example, we are constantly improving our DB code. We can support significantly more people per database server than we used to be able to. That means that we need less servers. We've actually gotten rid of several of our database servers, without losing any data, and without affecting performance. But we didn't make a patch note saying "We improved DB performance by 20%" because who cares? It doesn't affect game play. Side note for the people who like this kind of stuff, since I originally benchmarked the db servers and calculated how many we would need, we've improved the numbers by over 10x. some of that was newer better hardware, some of that was improved code, and some of that was changing how the data was organized. These kinds of improvements are constant and ongoing. Were we planning on mega-servers when we first started down the path? I wasn't, but that doesn't mean that others weren't. There was a strong contingent of people within Carbine who always wanted to be a single mega server. Originally I told them it was impossible, it only became possible later because of things we came up with after the fact. That wasn't on my mind when working on improving the servers, that was just a happy outcome of making things better. | |} ---- ---- transfer to the PVE server, it is where everyone is. | |} ---- I'd just like to point out that these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, since there's still some discussion of architecture vs. impressions of population. Pyaray has very graciously explained how the post-megaserver realms can hold many more people than the pre-megaserver realms did, but nowhere in there did he say that the population as it currently exists actually needs to utilize that kind of extra capacity. Fingers crossed that someday it will be necessary, even if it isn't currently. | |} ---- I don't know, last night was interesting. With the crashing on housing, everyone was in Thayd and... yeah, I completely underestimated the population of Entity's Exiles. | |} ---- New instances in zones happen all the time now. Seriously, just group with someone that you are not 'next to' and you will see that they are in a different phase (because it says it). So, I'm not sure why you think that at all. For the record, it happens from the low levels all the way through cap now. | |} ----